City of Toronto at 5AM

Hi everyone, especially Bernie!

Thanks so much for this wonderful course. I've been trying to photograph the nights of Toronto but I couldn't produce anything nice. Thanks to this course, I can say I'm "decent" now!! so I'm excited to take my camera everywhere and practise.

My challenge here is that my city at night (like most cities) is extremely dark in the winter but it's strongly lit with street (and bar) lighting.

Here are some settings I tried using: (not all at once, but I played around with these mainly)

Shutter Priority at 1/20

ISO is auto but I set my max to 800

I decreased the Exposure to -0.3 and -0.7, sometimes -1.7

This is King St (just west of John St), it's a street full of bars.

This is a big, busy intersection during rush hour, on University Ave. and Richmond St. We don't have a lot of high buildings, but this is still downtown!

This is Old City Hall (built 1899). The orange windows are Hudson's Bay's seasonal window display. You can see (on the far right window) a manequin in a white gown.

This is financial district, believe it or not. We have a neighbourhood (a few blocks) of large historical-looking bank buildings. For example, the one on the right is the Scotiabank building. It's super busy here in rush hour, both above and below ground. We have an underground tunnel called the PATH (with shopping, food courts) that connects a lot of these buildings Old City Hall is just right behind that red traffic light, oops. Sorry for covering you, City Hall!

This is the CIBC building. In the previous photo, I was facing north. In this photo here, I just turned around and faced south (same intersection). As you can see, the Christmas trees are still up -and every single night after work I wanted to photograph those. Woohoo!!

This was me walking back home, back on King St (bat street) again. It's a little dark here, unfortunately (oops!!). But I caught that moving streetcar!

Thanks for stopping by!

Oh and these were all taken this morning in -20C weather. I took about 30 photos, on my last 5 my hands had pretty much given up. I used to work in the financial district and every night (I work late, I stay out late at bars as well) the financial district is diserted and I notice how beautiful the buildings really are (below photo). So I wanted to capture them in their most quiet times (that's 5am in the morning).

Couldn't have done it without this class! The photos before this class were terrible.

My camera is the Sony RX100 III. It's a point-and-shoot but with a lot of great features like a DSLR would have. It also takes photos in RAW.